


By Request...

by MarnaNightingale



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-21
Updated: 2004-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:04:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarnaNightingale/pseuds/MarnaNightingale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the memory of those eyes that haunted him, come the hours before dawn...</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Request...

**Author's Note:**

> So, [](http://damned-colonial.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://damned-colonial.livejournal.com/)**damned_colonial** took me off to see Master and Commander last night.  
>  And damn, but it was good.
> 
> And since around the time my brain was getting mobbed by Jack and James, hers was being invaded by Jack and Stephen, we talked ships and slash and squee'd to our heart's content and all that good stuff.  
> And we came to an accord. One snippet each, in our chosen fandom, to the other's guidelines.
> 
> She wanted Jack, Barbossa, and a topgallant rigging.
> 
> So here's hers. I'm looking forward to mine, and to the opportunity to start pimping her truly elegant stuff to you all.

It was the memory of those eyes that haunted him, come the hours before dawn, when the revelry had faded, and the drink had left him, for once, sleepless. Sleepless and aloft, high above the deck of his regained lady, one arm slung companionably around her main-mast.

He'd planned that death, carried it at his belt, for so long. He'd watched those eyes close for the last time a thousand times in his dreams.

Never once had he imagined that the last thing he'd see in them was gratitude.

It was the memory of that last glimpse that had brought him back to the place where two very young men had sometimes found a few precious moments of solitude, apart or together, back when neither had owned a thing in the world worth coveting. The place where they had planned their brilliant careers, safe from the taunts of the older men.

The place where he'd first noticed those eyes, striking in that plain and open face, black as the sea beneath him was tonight and like that sea, lit with flashes deep within like drowned stars. Where he had hesitantly made a suggestion that had as hesitantly been accepted, beginning something as much about mutual protection as mutual desire, as much about choosing before you were chosen as it was about the awkward fumblings that the Pearl's sway slowly taught them to transform into something more. The place where he had first seen those eyes shine with the gratitude of one who has, against all expectation, been offered salvation when he looked only for endless pain.

It was the memory of gratitude stealing into those eyes that kept him there until moonset, braiding another trinket into the tangle of his hair, taking a last piece of his enemy into himself. Making him one of the numbered dead.

 _We're even, mate_ , he said silently to the empty rigging portside. _I collected what you owed me. And I paid you what I owed._

All of it.


End file.
